Education at the Crossroads: Inclusive Education for the Global Refugee Crisis

The global refugee population continues to climb and the number of refugees across the globe is at an alarming high and is expected to continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Access to education is a basic human right and is linked to poverty reduction, holding promises of stability, economic growth, and better lives for children, families, and communities. Refugee children and adolescents remain amongst the most marginalized groups in education. Refugee children and youth have frequently missed substantial amounts of schooling due to the effects of conflict. The lack of high quality and protective education for refugees stands in the way of meeting education for all goals, of achieving durable solutions, and of sustainable development and reconstruction of home and host countries. Inclusive education is a process of strengthening the capacity of the education system to reach out to all learners and can thus be understood as a key strategy to achieve education for all. However, Collecting regular, reliable and disaggregated education statistics on refugees are notoriously complex meaning that education indicators for this sub-group can be difficult to estimate. Education indicators for refugees may not be included in either the statistics of the refugee's country or the country hosting the refugees itself. The World is witnessing the largest refugee crises in decades. Crisis and conflict are among the biggest obstacles to ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all. However, education is a human right with important implications for health, livelihood, and peace building in contexts of conflict and crisis. We need to make changes to the way we respond to the changing landscape of the displaced, particularly refugees. Education is one of the most prominent needs of displaced refugees. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the global refugee crisis creating hurdles in the field of education for achieving success in inclusive education all around the globe. The objective of this paper is to point out the obstacles and elaborate challenges in education with special reference to inclusive education for the global refugee crisis.